"The Lumbee Indians" paints picture of a diverse people

Saturday

Book review: Malinda Maynor Lowery writes a scholarly history of her people in "The Lumbee Indians."

For those who see the South in terms of black and white, the Lumbee Indians have always posed a problem.

The largest Native American community east of the Mississippi, the Lumbees continue to occupy the lands they've called home for centuries, mostly in Robeson County. Some people, and some Lumbees, still claim that they're the descendants of the Croatan Indians and of the survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh's "Lost Colony."

Yet the Lumbees have strained relations with many other established tribes, and they've fought a frustrating political battle in Washington to win the benefits that other Native communities receive.

The case against the Lumbees is complex. Critics claim they don't have a traditional tribal structure. (The Lumbee constitution was only adopted in 2000.) They don't have a separate language. Their tribal religion is either Methodist or Baptist.

Also their ancestry is clearly mixed. As Malinda Mayor Lowery, a Lumbee herself, notes in her groundbreaking history, the Lumbees probably descend from bands of multiple tribes -- Cheraw, Saponi, Hatteras, Tuscarora and possibly even the remains of the Cape Fear Indians from the southeastern coast -- who were pushed back into pocosins and swamplands in the 1700s and early 1800s. These groups spoke multiple languages (Algonquian, Siouan or Iroquoian), so they adopted English as a lingua franca.

Their very name, "Lumbee" (from the nearby Lumber River) was only adopted in the 1950s. Before that, they had been referred to by state government as "Croatans," "Cherokees" (although the Lumbee have no ties to the Cherokee nation) or Siouans.

Yet they formed tight-knit families and close communities. Joining them, and intermarrying with them, were a number of whites (often escaping debtor's prison or the hangman's noose) -- and a number of escaped slaves and "free persons of color."

As a result, some Lumbees resemble Hollywood Indians out of central casting. Others resemble African-Americans. Yet others, with fair hair and pale skin, could attend a Klan rally. And members of all three groups could claim each other as cousins.

All this doesn't matter, according to Lowery. Most Indian tribes are mixtures of different groups. The difference is a holdover of 19th century racism, which held that no "pure" Indians could have a drop of black blood.

Lowery is highly skeptical of the whole "Lost Colony" business (although some Lumbee writers, such as Adolph Dial in "The Only Land I Know," still swear by the tale). The "Croatan" theory seems to have emerged with a white state legislator, Hamilton Macmillan, in the 1880s, possibly for cynical political reasons. To lure the Lumbees from the Republican Party, Tar Heel Democrats offered them recognition, their own segregated school system and own teachers' training school (now the University of North Carolina at Pembroke).

Still -- as readers of Josephine Humphreys' classic "Nowhere Else on Earth" know -- Lumbee history has plenty of romance. There's the whole saga of Henry Berry Lowry, the "Lumbee Robin Hood," who resisted Confederate officials conscripting Lumbees as slave labor to help build Fort Fisher and who robbed from the rich to give to the poor.

Lowry's Maid Marion was the beautiful Rhoda Strong. Once, when three of Lowry's cohorts were jailed in Wilmington, Rhoda came to town to free them -- either by dallying with the jailer or whacking him over the head. (Lumbee women, Lowery notes proudly, are especially independent. Until the 1870s, many Lumbee men took their wives' families' names, instead of the other way around. And many Lumbee women, in the Depression or other hard times, kept their families fed by bootlegging.)

Then there was the Battle of Hays Pond in 1958, when a band of Lumbees -- including a number of World War II and Korean veterans -- broke up a Klan rally and ran the Klansmen out of Robeson County.

Lowery, a former Harvard professor who is now director of the Center for the Study of the American South at Chapel Hill, writes dense chapters of historical analysis. She punctuates them, however, with personal interludes, stories from her own family and impressionistic descriptions of such customs as Lumbee Homecoming, which usually takes place each year around the Fourth of July.

A late chapter covers the scourge of the drug trade, which worsened a culture of violence. Of interest to Wilmington readers: Lowery offers an alternative explanation for the murder of Michael Jordan's father, James, which differs markedly from the official version.

Reporter Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-343-2208 or Ben.Steelman@StarNewsOnline.com.

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